Pages

Sunday, September 14, 2014

The Rotor Concepts Discover quadcopter, is a low priced quad capable of carrying a GoPro, but in plagued with a myriad of problems. If you take a quick look at the forums you can see all the problems, others including myself have had it crash during flight for no reason, then gotten no response from Rotor Concepts asking about it. Pros
Low price of about $300
Capable of carrying GoPro

Cons
Long twelve hour charge time
Designed to fail
High cost replacement parts
No Customer service
Only 12 minute flight time
Promised features don't work

About two months ago my Dad brought home a Discovery Quadcopter, it was my third quadcopter, in the past I have had 2 other toy like quadcopters, and about 4 other flying toys. However, unlike the other quadcopters, this one was far more powerful( capable of carrying a gopro), and was packed full of tons of features such as GPS homing, and GPS hold, but besides for that it was about the same as my other two. After getting everything out of the box and reading the manual, I plugged the battery into the charger and waited, according to the manual it should have only taken about four hours to charge, but instead took about 12 hours until the light on the charger turned green. Next we took it out to a fairly large park and it worked great, I tested the autohome by turning off the controller when it was hovering about 3 feet from the ground. It flew back to the origin. My only complaints at this point were the flight time about 12 minutes(Take this with a grain of salt, I live at 7,000 feet, so the air is thinner), my other one was that GPS hold doesn't work. GPS hold is supposed to make the quad stay the same place no matter if wind is blowing, so not a big deal but not great either.

I sent them two emails(one to each email on their site) asking about what could be wrong with it. No response. About a month ago I took it on it's final flight, luckily I had a GoPro on it at the time, from the ground everything was normal, but in the air you can hear the motors cut out twice, the first time for a short period of time, and the second time enough time to invert itself and come crashing to the ground. The damage was a broken motor controller and cracked decimated body. I found out then that the motor controller was positioned at the end of arm, which is a terrible place because it is likley to break like it did, when put there. Most other quadcopter for this reason put it in the center.

I went online to their website to look at the cost of replacement parts, it was over $70. $38 for ESC and $35 for the body, nearly the same ESC on amazon costs just $12. They have a model like the printer model, lure you in with a cheap price, then kill you on the consumables. I then sent them two an E-mail asking them what caused the crash with the GoPro video because I don't want to spend $70 and have this happen again. No response. I then said that I would be posting the video in a week and got an e-mail back within the hour saying "We are analyzing what caused the crash". A week went by and I said I would be posting it soon. No response. I then gave them 10 days in the off chance that they were back logged on emails. So here I am today telling you not to buy anything from Rotor Concepts.